A Strange Start

Frame number one, on one of its earliest outings.

This blog starts in a bit of a strange place. Around the time 2019 turned into 2020, I got the daft idea in my head to get myself a new road bike to replace my Giant Defy. A couple of browsing trips to local bike shops soon transformed that into the dafter idea still to go for one of the increasingly on-trend new gravel bikes, and thus save a bit of space by merging my road bike and mountain bike into one mythical do-everything machine.
After all, I'd long since lost the nerve (and the handling skills) for any "proper" mountain biking, and was really just using my trusty Rockhopper as a way to access hillwalking routes. I sure didn't have the legs to be of any use as a road cyclist either, so going for something lightweight and high performance just had me fearing being the all-the-gear-no-idea poser that I'd so often mocked.

Spec sheets were pored over, advice was sought, and shop floors were browsed, until eventually I had my mind set on a Ribble CGR 725. During the frustratingly long wait for my bike to work voucher to clear, I was spending most of my free time watching youtube videos, virtually scouting the landscape via OS map, and dreaming of all the big bikepacking and gravel riding adventures the new bike and I would be undertaking.

Eventually, the new bike arrived, but all was not quite as I'd dreamt. The first bike had a pretty rotten paint job, and the clear coat had started rubbing off within less than a week. Ribble sorted out a replacement frame, and just as I'd started getting all the bits and pieces transferred over, noticed that the headtube had some casting flaws that meant that the headset bearings wouldn't sit in. Frame number three appeared, and that meant I finally had something to get out and about on. Sadly, this coincided round about the time that the first reported cases of Coronavirus were starting to appear in the UK.

So as I write this now, on the 1st of April 2020, the UK's been in lockdown for nine days, and all of the grand plans have been put well-and-truly on hold, but I'm trying my hardest not to let it dampen my enthusiasm altogether. I was lucky enough to get out for two rides in the wilds before everything got shut down altogether, and for now the government guidance allows people to get out for one period of exercise a day, so long as it's a solo outing, and there's no travel to the exercise location. While this has put paid to any notions of epic adventures across the wild reaches of Scotland, it has given me an opportunity and a wee mini-challenge to explore some more local terrain and see what hidden gems I can root out within reach of my doorstep.